Force feedback of track surface

[h106frp]

Would it be possible too add force feedback rumble to reflect the 'feel' of the track surface?.

Having done a lot of laps it feels like it would be nice to have a bit of feedback when you hit bumps or rumble strips on track. I suppose it would be an indication of the vertical accelerations experienced by the rider.

Had a quick look and it seems straight forward to send the rumble signal using Xinput for left motor/right motor, if the sim sensed a sudden change in acceleration it could trigger a rumble signal of suitable magnitude and frequency

[CapeDoctor]

a big + 1 from me - this could/should help riders who use it to 'feel' the grip a bit more, i hope - currently it's a little vague, at least for me, and i often end up losing the front simply from a lack of feel (or track knowledge, lol)
it's the only area that i can see where GP500 still has a slight edge - you can 'feel' the front end grip much better, and can save a front end/low side a little easier than with GPB.
in most all other aspects, GPB is way ahead of GP500, but i do feel it's lacking a bit in front end feel.
that said, practise makes perfect, and so i'm still practising 

[HornetMaX]

To me it's mostly gimmick: it shouldn't be too hard to have something related to the vertical bike acceleration, but what for ?
To tell you you're on a curb maybe. Not much else this could do in terms of "feeling" ...

MaX.

P.S.
As I've been playing with XInput for the MaxHUD plugin (the combined triggers were too ugly to stare at, so I had to go down the XInput path, it will be in the next release), it should be relatively easy to do a test of this rumble stuff within the plugin. Of course, if the feature is useful (which I doubt), it should be integrated in GPB.

[h106frp]

To me it's mostly gimmick: it shouldn't be too hard to have something related to the vertical bike acceleration, but what for ?
To tell you you're on a curb maybe. Not much else this could do in terms of "feeling" ...

MaX.

P.S.
As I've been playing with XInput for the MaxHUD plugin (the combined triggers were too ugly to stare at, so I had to go down the XInput path, it will be in the next release), it should be relatively easy to do a test of this rumble stuff within the plugin. Of course, if the feature is useful (which I doubt), it should be integrated in GPB.

I was thinking along similar lines that the telemetry plugin velocity could be linked to the xinput plugin to give the option of rumble. I think rumble is just one of those things people expect to see implemented these days and maybe something that helps to sell a racing sim to a wider (console) audience.

Its more of an immersion thing - shakes on screen driving the rumble motors but then immersion = more simulation. They seem to be programmable for amplitude and 2 frequency ranges so it seems possible to give a decent sensible sensation of rider vibration. It is not a force feedback device but it would be a bit of fun  .

I still have my variable frequency (speed) shaker to wire up to the RPM signal for a bit of engine vibration feel  I bet i have the only 0-16000 rpm rumble shaker



It would be fun to feed the accelerations to some decent linear transducers though  maybe a tri-axial arrangement of buttkickers.

[HornetMaX]

I was thinking along similar lines that the telemetry plugin velocity could be linked to the xinput plugin to give the option of rumble.

It's much easier than that: an output plugin has all the telemetry data, so you can pick on which value(s) you want to make your rumble depend on. First sight, I'd say CoG acceleration is a good candidate.

After that, you just need the plugin to use the xinput API (windows standard) and you're all done. You don't even need the (GPB) xinput plugin (which makes GPB able to read input from an xinput device).

It sounds like a 15min coding job, except the time one would need to tune it properly. I'll try to play with that and report back.

MaX.

[h106frp]

Exciting stuff 

Might be nice to do a simple release with a gain slider for each axis acceleration into a mixer for each motor to experiment with the tuning.

I think a lot of people would appreciate this mod 

Are the accelerations relative to the bike axis or absolute relative to the world?

[HornetMaX]

If the wifey falls asleep this afternoon I'll give it a shot.

Likely there won't be fancy sliders (the plugin is only allowed to draw ... rectangles), but that won't be an issue.

MaX.

[HornetMaX]

Hmmm ... I can make the pad vibrate, that's easy. The hard part is: when and how should I make it vibrate ?

@h106frp: with the telemetry plugin activate full logging (dump_all=True in the MaXTM.ini), record 1-2 laps and have a look at the graphs of the X, Y and Z accelerations (with respect to the bike, X is lateral, Y is vertical and Z is longitudinal).

MaX.

[h106frp]

Work all day  but i will have a look this evening 

What is is like if you just feed the scaled values constantly to the vibration output?

The available range 0 to 65,535 might suggest an exponential non linear scaling could work best to give more output for more severe bumps. This would mean the small stuff is barely felt in the background running of the rumble motor.

Not sure how the 2 different motors 'feel' as i have not had a good game that used them effectively yet. From the description it would seem you would need to have a 'running' filter if you have to decide which motor due to event frequency 

I would guess the vertical acceleration would be the most useful for representing the vibrations felt through the bars and pegs.

Looking forward to giving this a try  Is the plugin a standalone or is it part of the telemetry plugin?

[HornetMaX]

Most likely it will be part of the HUD plugin as it has all the "infrastructure" for the menu, options etc and it makes more sense than in the telemetry plugin.

I'll see if I can come up with something like: convert the accelerations provided by GPB (X, Y, Z in bike's chassis frame) to world frame and have a look at the evolution of the Z acceleration (Z meaning vertical). Maybe some simple dependency on that would do it.

I'm tempted to have a vibration each time there's a gear shift: it's extra easy and could be funky

MaX.

[h106frp]

I like the idea of a bit of a bump from shifting gears and as you mention easy to detect in the telemetry. Rider off bike would be another easy one to trigger

I was wondering if you could separate the two motor  frequency ranges using a simple rolling average filter on the acceleration data stream, maybe with a kernel (cut off) equal to 1/4 or 1/2 a second worth of samples. The low passed output value going to the low frequency motor and the difference between this mean value and the peak in the kernel sample length going to the high frequency motor, a very simple but low overhead low/high pass filter.

[BOBR6 84]

Maybe a little vibration when the rear wheel lifts slightly and touches the track again when braking hard 

Sounds great nice work!

[HornetMaX]

Still pondering the options ...

I think I'll do the "rumble on gear shift" anyway, that seems cool to me

For the rest, probably I'll start with the bike acceleration magnitude signal, send it through a digital bandpass filter and use the output do decide when and how to rumble.

MaX.

[SKD]

Happy to here you're working on this. I think the main problem with bike sims at the moment is that no matter how realistic it is, it still doesn't feel that way because you only have visual feedback. Feeling when you're near the limit could be a useful and fun feature.
Does Force Feedback with gamepads only feature vibration? Or also forces against the controll sticks? Just recently bought a force feedback gamepad but only played gp bikes so far, so I don't know. The force feedback for driving wheels is a very cool and useful feature!

[Ian]

Rumble when the front locks would help or when the rear locks